How to Remember, part 2

"I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out … It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones."- Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet

As promised yesterday, there is another memory trick for memorizing a list that does not rely on a story chain. Have you ever wondered why people say, “In the first place” and “in the second place?” The tradition is over 2000 years old.

In ancient Greece, the Athenians (for awhile) had a democracy and any male could speak before the legislative body to propose a law. Those who succeeded in politics were the frequently the best at public speaking. And so in Athens around 300 BC we find the first schools that teach rhetoric and speaking skills. One method taught was to picture your speech laid out in the rooms of your house or at significant stopping points along some route. You picture your first key point in the first room or place. Your second talking point in the second place, etc.

To use yesterday’s grocery list as an example:

I visualize a cabbage as the doorknob of my front door. The hallway is filled with carrots growing. Then I see the kitchen with leeks hanging from the ceiling. The living room is filled to the ceiling with beets. There is a cow in my backyard. The back gate has loaves of bread impaled on it.

It helps to make the pictures outrageous so you’ll remember them. It also helps to have a Greek style house where you can walk through rooms in a circle around the central courtyard. In my house I reached a dead end rather soon and had to step outside.

There is also a variation on this technique that ties a new list to an ordered list you already know. The most common example is the song, “This old man” since the images and numbers are so tightly linked with rhyme:

1. Thumb
2. Shoe
3. Knee
4. Door
5. Hive
6. Sticks
7. Heaven
8. Gate
9. Spine
10. Over again (or big fat hen?)

Now I would imagine the grocery list as follows:

I stick my thumb in the cabbage. It’s stuck there
My shoe is filled with carrots.
My knee has swollen so it looks like a beet. (I’m moving the leeks to #6)
There is a steak nailed to my door dripping juice
Honey from a hive is pouring onto a slice of bread
The sticks look just like leeks.

If someone asks what is the fourth item on the list, I think: 4 = door. What’s on my door? Oh, yes, a juicy steak.

Bottom Line

This technique of linking items to places or a well-known list is more difficult than story telling but it has advantages. You could recite the list backwards or recall any single item from the list upon request. And forgetting one item won’t break a chain causing you to forget everything following it. The disadvantage comes when trying to memorize more than one list at a time. Having multiple items in your rooms or nailed to a door will get confusing. And how will you separate one list from the other? Rooms in different houses? By some secondary key like color, scent, or sound?